⌾Curio #46 - Tim Urban, Beautiful Bookstores & Junun
Welcome back to another edition of Curio, your weekly antidote to the chaotic and exhausting news cycle.
I made it! Fourteen days in a hotel room. No in-person contact, no window to open, no direct sunlight. Each day identical to the next. The food was comically bad (example below). It wasn’t easy.
A typical dinner. Before you ask, the circular thing is a soggy macaroon
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And to top it off, I received a three thousand dollar invoice from the Australian government for my stay. At least I got a certificate!
It was all worth it
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This is what kept me sane: disconnecting from the news and social media, long luxurious bubble baths, Sam Harris’s meditation app, doing SarahBeth’s yoga classes on Youtube, reading Karl Ove Knausgaard, watching Eric Rohmer films, completing an entire online course on the history of Europe from 1648-1945, ordering Fishbowl and Eat Fuh on UberEats, as well as watching the US Open and NBA finals. One of the big silver linings to the experience was sleep. With the room’s blackout curtains, comfy king bed and soundproof windows, I slept better than I ever had in my life.
Indeed, by historical standards, my quarantine experience could have been much worse. The term ‘quarantine’ originally comes from the old Venetian word for forty days. It derives from the fourteenth-century practice of the city-state Venice requiring ships arriving from unknown locations to moor off the port for forty days in order to contain the spread of the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in human history. Imagine crossing the ocean in a cramped and rat-infested wooden ship to then be told you had to bob in the harbor for an extra forty days before being able to land. No wifi or bubble baths for them!
I’m now back in the real world and am loving being able to walk around outside with fresh air in my nostrils and the warm glow of sunlight on my skin.
Yours in freedom,
Oli
Tim Urban on Procrastination
With its use of child-like stick figures, old fashioned design and humorous tone, you could be forgiven for assuming the website Wait But Why shouldn’t be taken too seriously. In fact, it’s one of the internet’s most influential blogs, full of thought-provoking long form pieces touching the deepest questions.
The creator of this brilliant website is Tim Urban. After graduating from Harvard filled with ambition and expectations of success, Urban moved to LA to pursue a career as a film score composer. However, after a few years of not making much progress, he found himself drifting and uninspired. He launched a tutoring business with a friend and starting blogging on the side and then in 2013, at thirty, decided to devote himself to writing Wait But Why full time.
“I want to write about what's interesting, and what's interesting isn't obvious. It's something with enough research or enough thought and brainstorming that people think or learn something that they didn’t know already.”
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Wait But Why is full of great content, but some favorites of mine include:
The Fermi Paradox (on why humans haven’t found aliens yet)
A few years ago, Urban gave an entertaining TED Talk on procrastination. His thesis is that we’re all procrastinators to a certain extent. Deadlines are what scare people into getting things done, yet many of our dreams and aspirations don’t have deadlines. This causes people to keep putting them off. Urban’s talk now has over thirty million views and is one of the most popular in the history of TED. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it before.
Beautiful Bookstores
While last week I showcased some extraordinary libraries, this week I wanted to share a selection of some of the world’s most beautiful bookstores. What I would give to be able to teleport to that one in Santorini right about now…
Lello in Porto, Portugal
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Zhongshuge in Chongqing, China
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Boekhandel Dominicanen in Maastricht, The Netherlands
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El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Cărturești Carusel in Bucharest, Romania
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Atlantis Books in Santorini, Greece
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Junun
In 2015, Shye Ben Tzur, an experimental Israeli musician who had lived in India for over a decade, was contacted by Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead and classically trained composer. Greenwood was a longtime admirer of Ben Tzur’s sound and wanted to see if he was interested in collaborating. The two of them were joined by a nineteen member local group called the Rajasthan Express. Ben Tzur wrote the songs and Greenwood contributed on the guitar, bass, keyboards and ondes Martenot. The final result became the album Junun, mixed by Nigel Godrich and recorded in the glorious Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.
The following is the opening song, also called Junun. It’s an exuberant and rhythmic track that showcases the virtuosity and unique combination of sounds within the group.
The creation of the album Junun is also the subject of a great documentary of the same name by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Magnolia, Boogie Nights). The trailer is below:
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
- Bertrand Russell
Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne